Adi Alsaid - Never Always Sometimes

“I’m ready,” Dave said, wondering what Julia would make of the conversation.

“You can handle it? Peering deep into my soul?”

“To be honest, right now it kind of feels like I can peer into everyone’s soul.”

“That sounds pretty scary to me,” Vince said with a smile. He ran a hand over his head, which was shaved recently, only the thinnest layer of fuzz starting to show through. “I am so in love,” he groaned, putting his elbows on his knees and slouching over. “Two years, man. She’s like some sickness I can’t get rid of.”

“Who?”

“Carly,” he said quietly, though no one was paying enough attention to them to hear. “She’s all I think about.” Vince looked so sad all of a sudden.

“Does she know?”

“I was always waiting for the right time to tell her, then she met some guy from Pacific Beach. At one of our games, no less. She’s been dating him for over a year, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I wake up at four a.m. thinking of things to say to her, and I repeat them to myself until my alarm goes off and it’s time to go to school to stop myself from saying it.”

Dave made a little hum of agreement in the back of his throat. Inside the house, people were taking pictures of themselves on their phones, making faces, kissing each other on the cheek. Their eyes were glazed over, and everyone seemed to be either shouting across the room or whispering into someone else’s ear. He couldn’t remember who Carly was. “You could tell her anyway. Just to get it off your chest.”

“I don’t want it off my chest, though. It keeps me close to her. Plus, she’s happy, and it’s not my place to disturb that.” He sat back against the bench and smiled sadly. “Is that weird?”

“Nah, it’s not weird. Actually, Julia and I have this list...” He stopped himself when he couldn’t think of how to phrase what he wanted to say without calling Vince a cliché. So many people were quietly in love that he and Julia considered it part of a normal high school experience and had therefore sworn it off. But Dave hadn’t really thought about it in those terms in a long time. Pining silently was a cliché, which meant that people were constantly in love with each other without saying a thing about it. How much unrequited, unspoken love filled up the halls every day? How many kids in class felt exactly like Dave did on a day-to-day basis? “You’re probably not alone,” Dave finally settled for. “I’m sure most of us are thinking about someone else when we’re in class.”

“Yeah, but that’s mostly horniness.”

They chuckled, then Dave finished his beer and crumpled it like Vince had. “Do you want to talk more about Carly?”

“Nah,” Vince said, standing up. “Just saying it out loud every now and then makes it more bearable. Thanks for listening. Let’s go inside and get drunker and talk to other people who are being gently eaten alive by longing.”

Dave smiled, and then took the hand Vince was offering to help him off the bench. Dave strolled around the house, reveling in everyone’s drunkenness, and how different it was than he’d imagined. It made him think of the title of one of his favorite albums, You Forgot It in People by Broken Social Scene, and he was a little embarrassed that he’d assumed all of his classmates were cartoons of teenagers.

When he couldn’t spot Julia anywhere, he checked his phone again and saw that the battery had died. There was a flutter of worry when the screen didn’t click on, Dave feeling like a shitty friend for being unreachable, for maybe causing her to worry. Then the mood of the party settled back into his bones and he pocketed the phone, sure that Julia was elsewhere in the house, enjoying herself in just the same way he was.

He’d ended up in the den, where he stared at the hundreds of books in the Kapoors’ library, turning his head slightly to read the spines.

“I do that, too,” a girl’s voice said.

He looked up to find Gretchen, a girl from his AP Chemistry class. Her back was to him, but he could recognize her by her hair, which was wavy enough to maybe be considered curly. It was dark blond, lightening up toward the ends, though he didn’t know enough about her or her hair to know if the blonder tips were natural or the evidence of a past dye job.

She turned to look at him, big brown eyes and the hint of a smile. At a glimpse, he could tell that her bottom teeth were slightly crooked. The world was full of details he’d failed to notice before.

“Do what?” he said.

“Check out bookshelves at strangers’ houses,” she answered, stepping up next to him and looking at the books as if to prove she wasn’t lying. “I’m usually a bit awkward in houses that I haven’t been to before, so it’s a way to not look weird. If I find something I’ve read before it automatically makes me more comfortable.”

He looked over at Gretchen, who fixed her eyes on the books. She was in a simple blue dress and—Dave couldn’t help the thought—looked lovely. “Is that what you’re doing now?”

She met his eyes for just a moment and turned them away again, trying to hide a grin. “Oh, I don’t know how to read.”

She was laughing as she said it, showing another glimpse of her crooked lower teeth. They weren’t unsightly, just imperfect. Dave liked the look of them, for some reason.

Dave chuckled. “That was one of the worst attempts at a lie I’ve ever seen.”

“Dammit, I know.” She blushed a little and rolled her eyes at herself. “I’ve been trying to get better, but I smile every time. I think I could be one of the greatest pranksters of our generation, but my mouth just doesn’t want any part of it. Stupid smile.”

“I’m Dave. We have AP—”

“AP Chem, I know. Come on, Dave, I live, like, a block away from you. We were in the same lab group that one time.”

“Right. Sorry, I just usually assume people don’t know me.”

“I know you,” she said. A lock of blond hair fell in front of her face and she pulled on it, examining the lighter ends for a few seconds before letting it drop against her dress. “So, have you read any of these?”

“All of them,” Dave said. A silent, funny look passed between them, acknowledging the fact that he’d delivered the line with a straight face.

Gretchen reached over and pulled a maroon book out at random. “What’s this one about?” She turned the book over and pretended to read the back copy, though there wasn’t any. She furrowed her brow and concentrated, but the corners of her mouth twitched anyway, begging to smile.

He took a step closer to her and pulled the book up to read the title, California Real Estate Law 1987–1992 . At this distance, it was hard not to notice Gretchen in her entirety. He’d always seen her out of the corner of his eyes, blond locks and not much more, talkative, active at school in the way that he and Julia inherently disapproved of. Her legs were tan from soccer practices in the sun, and she wore scuffed beige sneakers that didn’t really go with her dress. “This one’s an adventure-slash-love story,” he said, looking at the faint dimple in her chin.

“Ooh, that’s my favorite genre! And here I was judging the book by its cover.”

“What was your guess? Judging by the cover.”

“Erotica,” she said, nodding. “I would have definitely thought hard-core erotica.”

He laughed, the image of her reforming itself, starting to fill up with color.

“So tell me about this adventure-slash-love story.”

Maybe for the first time, he looked at her and saw more than just her face. The words that he would have used to describe her yesterday—that she was just another popular pretty girl, a soccer player who maybe ran for student council or worked on the yearbook or something like that—suddenly seemed to lack any real description. That was true of many of the people at the party, he realized. It was like he’d been carrying around a coloring book that hadn’t yet been drawn in. He and Julia knew the outlines of people, but not much more.